


time crawling to a slow end

by unconscious



Series: endgame [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 17:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18665092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unconscious/pseuds/unconscious
Summary: “And you know what happened?” Steve says, his attention halfway in his own new past. “They - we - the you and me I recovered - fell in love.”It’s like someone broke a board over Bucky's head.Steve left, lived a life, and returned. Bucky doesn't know if he can bear it.





	time crawling to a slow end

**Author's Note:**

> Please note this is not a fix-it fic but it DOES include words spoken between Steve and Bucky which is an improvement on Endgame itself. (title from Jeff Buckley's What Will You Say)

Bucky watches Steve pass the shield to a stunned Sam Wilson. Steve—his Steve, his best friend, his whatever they were, throughout all these years—gone and returned. A lifetime between them in a blink of an eye. As Bucky approaches he is suddenly, jarringly reminded of cryo. The wretched bolt of confusion carving him upon awakening like a blade in his mind. No time has passed, yet everything is different, and he is again the one unmoored.

Even with the vast void of a life without Steve in front of him, Bucky couldn’t ask him to stay. Not when Steve had that determined-defeated set to his shoulders in his funeral suit. Couldn’t give him the option of sacrificing himself one last time, because Steve would’ve done it. Steve would’ve stayed for him, regardless of Steve's own desires, and then Bucky’s life would be defined by guilt for however long his mutated cyborg body deigned to give him. He had enough guilt. 

Steve looks up. His deeply-lined blue eyes are rich with memory, memories without Bucky. He nods at the seat next to him. Bucky sits and gazes out at the lake.

“In my lifetime—” Steve says, and his voice is still the same, and Bucky closes his eyes and sees his friend as he was just moments ago: broad, weary, focused, alone. The cryo-feeling is in his chest now, cold and tight. His throat constricts. “In my lifetime you never wore your hair long.”

Bucky takes a few deep breaths until he can speak. “How was it, then?”

“Your hair? Oh, always stylish. Pomade, or something...”

Bucky’s own snort of laughter surprises him. “You sound jealous.”

Steve softens. “Will you look at me? I know it’s strange."

“It was just a few moments." Bucky looks at Steve because he can’t deny Steve anything, especially now. To his shock Steve touches his cheek with one soft wrinkled hand so unlike the muscled hands he knows. Bucky closes his eyes and thinks about those hands callused so thickly from the shield it seemed to reach bone and fingers still so nimble and dexterous from art school and oh, Bucky's face crumples under Steve’s touch, he’ll never see those hands again.

“Jeez, I missed you,” Steve says, so quietly, like he’s speaking to himself. He drops his hand and Bucky opens his eyes blinking away tears and it’s still Steve, his Steve. Older. Smaller.

“I married her,” Steve says. “Like I always thought I would. And—we had a few good years. But it was hard. Hiding who I was. Trying to do something good with the knowledge I had of the future. I wanted to better the world. Do the right thing. But I was also—I wanted—I wanted a peaceful life. With her. I wanted to focus on that, a marriage. I guess—" he shakes his head slightly, smile somewhere between fond and sardonic— “Pegs and I both needed a war to thrive. Without a war we didn’t really fit. We fought a lot. And we both had so much to do. And eventually she left me and remarried. Married the same guy she married when I was in the ice. I guess some things are meant to be.”

Bucky gapes at him. “Why didn’t you come back?”

“I created that world." It's resigned, rehearsed, like he’s worked through this many times. “That entire timeline. When I chose to stay, that reality branched off. Those people existed and lived those lives with or without me. Everyone’s lives—everything that happened—was because I made a choice to stay. I couldn’t just abandon it because my marriage didn’t work out like I thought it would.”

Bucky says nothing. Something in his heart is screaming, caged, like the moment before the wipe when the device begins to hum and lower towards his head and his body strains to escape but can’t, that moment of pure terror, but that moment stretched forever.

“I got myself out of the ice,” Steve says. “I was working for SHIELD. Under Peggy. Picking out the Hydra plants. Started the Avengers program in the sixties. Recruited Fury. And—and I got you back. Before Hydra got too deep.”

“Too deep," Bucky repeats. Its poison too deep in his mind. Beyond repair. Not worth staying.

“And you know what happened?” Steve says, his attention on Bucky but halfway in his own new past. “They—we—the you and me I recovered—fell in love.”

It’s like someone broke a board over his head. Bucky slumps forward over his own knees, his fingers tangling in his hair. “Oh, Stevie.” The words are quiet like a prayer.

Steve's hand rests on Bucky’s back, circling there, soothing, as he barrels forward quiet and steady. “We—they—were a team. The founding members of the Avengers. Big high security tower in midtown and a small brownstone in Clinton Hill.”

“You’re breakin’ my heart,” Bucky manages. He wants him to stop. He doesn’t want to know. Because if—if—how will he bear it?

“We had me over for dinner a lot, when I was older, and Pegs was busy with the kids and the job, and SHIELD didn’t need me around so much now that Fury was running the show. That little brownstone, Buck, you wouldn’t believe how happy we were.”

He can believe it. He can’t. It’s a nightmare. If he had escaped, or fought harder, or just—gotten Hydra out of him, somehow, he could’ve had the brownstone. He could’ve had a life shared with Steve. An apartment. A bed. Waking up with him in Brooklyn like they did nearly a hundred years ago. In Steve’s new life there’s a Bucky who kisses Steve and a Steve that kisses back. Oh God. He can’t stand it.

“I made a mistake staying there,” Steve says, quietly but firmly, like he is revealing a great secret. “I didn’t want Peggy—not really. I wanted—I wanted to die, I guess. I was hurting so bad. And leaving this reality was as close as I could get.”

“You punk,” Bucky chokes. “You boneheaded martyr. Fuckin’ Honest Abe over here. You’ve worked it all out but we’re all still here and it just happened and we’re all suicidal too. I can’t hit an old man but I sure as hell want to. You couldn’t just not come back? You couldn’t just let me remember your big speech about finding peace and imagine you happy?”

Steve jerks his hand away as if burnt. “Buck—”

Bucky sits up, finally, pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes and takes those deep centering breaths he’s so familiar with though often it feels as if they do nothing, as if his lungs aren’t his lungs they’re just more machinery keeping him galumphing miserably through this world waiting for the next directive to either experience or dole out pain. “Quit beatin’ around the bush,” he says, and he meets Steve’s eyes forcefully, and Steve looks so lost and hurt and hopeful that Bucky thinks he’s finally broken something he can’t heal.

“I’m sorry I ran,” Steve says. “I love you, jerk, I’ve loved you since you saw me getting my ass kicked in 1933. Through every war. Every loss. Every different life we’ve had it’s always been you and I ran from it.”

“Some things are meant to be, I guess,” Bucky spits. “In every universe I fall from that train. And every universe you bring me back. You’re my fuckin’ world, you punk. You were all I had in Brooklyn and the war and afterwards when they were scrambling my brains so I remembered nothing, I remembered your face. It took you unfreezing your younger self to realize this? I loved you on that helicarrier, you know that? They were in deep—" Bucky taps his own forehead, then jabs his finger at Steve’s chest— “So deep. My own nervous system electrocuting my brain telling me to kill you. But I couldn’t do it because it’s you and my body will tear itself apart before it’ll hurt you. And I didn’t tell you—” Bucky almost laughs. “I didn’t tell you to stay because I thought she was your best girl. I wanted you to be happy.”

Steve takes his hand.

“I think I’m gonna throw up,” Bucky says.

“Can I tell you about us? The us that had a life together?”

Bucky closes his eyes and leans against Steve, their fingers twining together. “No,” he says. “I know it. I know every possibility. I fuckin’ dream it every night.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, quietly, miserably.

“I have to live without you,” Bucky says, eyes closed, listening to the sound of Steve’s voice, inhaling the faint leather and soap smell of him, as if he could imprint the sense memories into his bones, “And they get two.”

 

Steve returns to his timeline—his home, Bucky thinks bitterly—and he’s alone on the bench. He feels hollowly nauseous.

“Well, seems like that went great,” Sam says carefully as he sits down where Steve was.

“He left, then five seconds later, he was physically 90 and told me he regretted leaving this timeline because he was suicidal when he did it and then realized he was in love with me after our alternate-universe counterparts fell in love, then he apologized and went back.”

“He wouldn’t stay?”

“He’s gonna die in that fuckin’ timeline,” Bucky says, and the realization knocks the wind out of him, and he collapses forward again, this time so far he hits the grass on his knees, and he’s on hands and knees in the dirt and he does vomit this time finally, like his body could purge itself of the pain. Steve will die and Bucky won’t be there. He won’t even know. “Permission to return to cryo,” he gasps.

“Denied,” Sam says gently, and he sits in the grass with Bucky and holds him for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. I am considering continuing this fic to be a Bucky/Sam fic especially with the upcoming TV series. Kudos/comments always appreciated!
> 
> edit: The Bucky/Sam sequel is part 3 of the series, though you don't need to read part 2 to understand it. [The Way Out Is The Way Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891376/chapters/44841664) begins where this fic ends.


End file.
